Martha
McSally's Garb In Saudi Arabia Chafed, So She Pressed a Lawsuit

Lt.
Col. Martha McSally told National Cathedral School
students that when a host country's customs conflict
with the Constitution, "that is where you draw the
line."

The
Air Force had promoted fighter pilot Martha McSally to lieutenant
colonel four years before her peers.

She had flown more than 100 hours
in her A-10, known as the Warthog. She affectionally called it "an
ugly down-and-dirty tank killer" with its single seat and its
fast-firing Gatling gun.

She was a champion triathlete. She
had a master's degree in public policy from Harvard, and she'd been a
White House Fellows finalist. She had patrolled the no-fly zone over
Iraq and would later direct search-and-rescue missions inside
Afghanistan.

She was quite a success story for
the modern military, which had worked hard to knock down barriers to
female achievement.

Then she landed at Prince Sultan
Air Force Base in Saudi Arabia in November of 2000.

Exactly what that would mean for
McSally became clear immediately. In a briefing right after she arrived,
officers matter-of-factly laid down the rules for travel off base, even
on official business: All female personnel would wear the customary
head-to-toe gown, the abaya and its matching head scarf, similar
to the Afghan burqa. They could not drive. They would ride in the
back seat. They would be escorted by males at all times.

Officials said they had constructed
the policy to keep from offending conservative Saudi leaders and to
protect U.S. troops from terrorist attacks. But to McSally, the
directive, with its different instructions for men and women,
"abandons our American values that we all raised our right hand to
die for."

Since 1995, long before her
deployment to the country, McSally had been fighting inside the system
to change the abaya rule. She raised "legitimate questions in a
very tactful way," says former Air Force secretary Whit Peters.

For that first ride in Saudi
Arabia, the officer followed orders. In the dead of night, she put on
the black gown, covered her head with the scarf and climbed into the
back of a Chevy Suburban with dark windows, while her military
inferiors, men in jeans and collared shirts, sat up front.

Last month, she sued Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, contending that the abaya policy is
unconstitutional because it discriminates against women and violates
their religious freedom by forcing them to adopt the garb of another
faith. The suit seeks no monetary damages.

Her cause has support from an
unlikely coalition of conservative Republicans and liberal feminists.

"What makes this particularly
bizarre," says Sen. Bob Smith (R-N.H.), one of five Republican
senators who has pushed the Defense Department to junk the policy,
"is that we are waging a war in Afghanistan to remove those abayas,
and the very soldiers who are conducting that war have to cover
up."

In a letter to Rumsfeld, Rep.
Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) wrote, "It is unconscionable that our own
U.S. government should uphold this institutionalized disrespect of women
by requiring that Americans conform to these standards." The policy
is "gross discrimination," says Eleanor Smeal, president of
the Feminist Majority Foundation. The National Coalition of Women's
Organizations also has lobbied Rumsfeld.

The policy, which affects about
1,000 women stationed in the theater, is "on people's radar, and
they are dealing with it," says Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria
Clarke.

By turns scrappy and cheery, blunt
and eloquent, the Air Force's highest-ranking female fighter pilot has
become a rare voice of dissent as the military carries out its missions
in regions requiring much diplomatic delicacy. McSally, 35, is speaking
up for civil liberties when the nation seems ready to submerge them in
service to the perceived greater good.

"Believe me," she says,
"the last thing I ever wanted to do was make a big deal about being
a woman. . . . As an officer, you need to shut up and follow when an
order is lawful. You need to step out when it's unlawful."

Now, she knows, her military career
may go down in flames.

Dress Code

Back in the states on leave, McSally stands at a lectern in the gym at
National Cathedral School. Before her are about 200 girls of the upper
school, many of them in flannel pajama bottoms for "school spirit
week." They are privileged and achieving girls, who expect life
will include fine SAT scores and excellent colleges and creature
comforts. It will not likely include basic training and barking
sergeants and enemy evasion training in some parched scrubland.

So they are frankly curious about
the fighter pilot, who wears a deep purple suit, gray pearl earrings and
a small American flag pin in her lapel. She looks normal enough,
neither like a rebel nor like some military robot type. She is small,
with freckles dusting her nose and bangs brushing her brows. Her
shoulder-length brown hair is pulled back into a ponytail.

When she walks in her heels, she
clomps a little, her shoulders leading her feet, maybe from all those
hours hunched over the cockpit controls.

When she talks, she uses the
language of the girls who are now listening to her.

When her father died of a heart
attack when she was 12, "it rocked my world," says McSally.
"I got in a lot of trouble."

When she got an "incentive
ride," the jet spin or two the Air Force offers to wow its cadets,
"I thought, 'Hey, this is pretty cool.' "

The girls do not fidget. When
McSally mentions having to ride in the back seat of the car in Saudi
Arabia, two of the students make faces at each other. "Eeeuuww,"
one says softly.

A biology major and a swimmer at
the Air Force Academy, McSally has applied the careful reasoning of a
scientist and the persistent discipline of an athlete to research the
policy that vexes her. She tells the girls that in seven years of
studying the question, she has found no rational reasons for the U.S.
rules governing female troops' behavior in Saudi Arabia.

McSally's own story is a reflection
of her nation's fragile, complicated and often contradictory
relationship with Saudi Arabia. The world's largest oil producer is an
ally as well as the homeland of Osama bin Laden and perhaps eight of the
Sept. 11 hijackers. It is a fundamentalist Islamic monarchy with a human
rights record the State Department regards as "generally
poor," according to a report last February. Early and enthusiastic
backers of the ultra-puritan Taliban, the Saudis also keep a bon vivant
of an ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who hobnobs on
the sidelines with Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.

There is much history here that the
NCS girls may not know.

Somewhere in this muddle is the
rationale for keeping female military personnel literally under wraps.
"We were putting our own women officers in a role counter to the
prevailing culture," says Peters, who was secretary of the Air
Force in 1998 and 1999, "and while we insisted [to the Saudis] that
women be dealt with like male officers, it was a question of not
aggravating a situation that was a strain." Female air traffic
controllers worked at Prince Sultan, for example, but Saudi pilots often
refused to talk to them.

McSally has no questions about the
importance of the U.S. mission there. "We're protecting their
interests, as well as our own," she says to the students.

Then she lays out her arguments to
them: The State Department does not require its female employees to wear
the abaya. Nor does the Saudi government insist, at least not formally.
Wives of military personnel stationed there do not have to wear the
garment. Nor was there an abaya rule for our military women when the
Iraqis invaded neighboring Kuwait and U.S. troops drove them out.
Furthermore, the policy specifically forbids male military personnel
from wearing traditional Saudi garb.

McSally has a solution: Women would
wear loose-fitting, modest shirts and long skirts that would cover them,
in deference to local mores.

She tells the NCS students that the
regulations have an insidious way of creeping into the on-base military
culture, reintroducing the idea of women as subservient to men to an
organization that worked hard to throw off those stereotypes.

The NCS girls ask smart and tough
questions. They hunt for compromise. They question her timing. "In
this time of heightened hostility, isn't this a safety issue?" one
asks. "I recently heard about force protection."

McSally asks them to envision the
scenario the policy outlines -- an American woman covered head to toe in
black, surrounded in downtown Riyadh by studly blond guys in crewcuts
and jeans. "We hardly blend in," she says with a broad
smile, and everybody cracks up at the image.

Here in America, another girl
ventures, we accept people from other countries and don't disrespect
those peoples' cultures. "So isn't it a question of respect, for
you to not adopt their dress?" she asks.

"Here's the difference,"
parries McSally. "We let them choose to wear whatever they wish.
When you value people, you give them freedom. That is who we are."

The military she loves has stripped
her of that choice, McSally suggests. She is an observant Christian
required against her will to represent herself as an adherent of a
religion, Islam, which is not her own. Her attorneys, who have been
hired by the Rutherford Institute, best known for its role in Paula
Jones's suit against President Clinton, contend the abaya policy
violates her First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion.

"If it were in our national
security to deploy to South Africa under apartheid, would we have found
it acceptable or customary to segregate African American soldiers from
other American soldiers, and say, 'It's just a cultural thing?' "
McSally asks. "I don't think so. I would hope not.

"When those customs and values
conflict with ones that our Constitution is based on, and that women and
men in uniform died for in the past, that is where you draw the
line."

When McSally finishes, the girls
give her a standing ovation.

'Make Me
Proud'

She was bad in high school.

Or, she was as bad as she could be
and still captain the track team and graduate first in her class at St.
Mary's Bay View Academy in Riverside, R.I.

"Martha was always on the edge
of the school rules with the nuns," says her brother, Mark, a
lawyer in Providence.

She was the youngest of five, and
her daddy doted on her. He was a successful lawyer and local politician,
and when he died just shy of his 50th birthday, McSally stormed into
adolescence armed with anger and grief. In the few brief hours she had
between her father's heart attack and his death, he told her, "Make
me proud."

That has driven her life.

"I guess I set up my own
challenges," McSally recalls now, during an interview in a New York
hotel. "I was trying to be the best of the best, and the worst of
the worst, and it was exhausting." She laughs. She laughs a
lot.

She and her friends would run
around for hours. They would go home and pass out. She would put on a
pot of coffee and stay up finishing some paper. When she graduated from
high school, she gave her mother a trophy.

Her family was stunned when Martha
decided to go to the Air Force Academy. "She was always a really
driven and focused individual, but given her outspokenness and her
independence, we weren't sure she'd make it there," says Mark
McSally. "My mother's feeling was relief, because she knew where
she was going to be for the next four years, and it would be under
stricter control."

So off Martha went to Colorado
Springs. First, she cut her hair shorter than the Air Force would have.
"Part of the program is taking you down and removing your identity
and building you back up the way they want you," says McSally.
"And I figured, okay, if you're gonna take away my identity, I'm
gonna do it first." She showed up wearing high-top sneakers, tight
black dance pants and a T-shirt printed with a plane and the word
"Kamikaze."

"I was pretty naive," she
says, laughing again.

During her sophomore year,
influenced by her swim team coach, she began "growing and learning
and knowing God. . . . It seemed to me this could heal me from grief and
loss. And I was making sense of the world by achieving, and there was an
emptiness there. I think there is a longing in everyone for a personal
relationship with God."

McSally never planned on being a
pilot. She was prone to motion sickness. But she began hanging out in
the flying squadron, and she got her joy rides, and -- partly because it
wasn't open to her -- she decided to be a fighter pilot. At 5-foot-3,
she was an inch too short to fly for the Air Force, period. She fought
for two years at the academy to get a waiver.

"I think the colonel got sick
of me coming to his office every week, asking why I had been rejected
again," she says. He designed a series of tests that allowed her to
prove that her leg muscles, honed in marathons, were just as strong as
those of approved pilots.

Then she broke her hand, which was
set improperly. After two hand surgeries and after graduating 25th in
her class from the academy and finishing graduate school, she entered
flight training, four years after she had applied.

In 1993, when the military opened
up combat positions for women, McSally was one of seven female officers
picked by the Air Force to fly combat planes. That same year, she won
the military division of the Hawaii Ironman World Triathlon
Championship, a grueling event that combines a 26.2-mile footrace, a
112-mile bike race and a 2.4-mile ocean swim.

McSally flies a fighter with only a
titanium tub between pilot and antiaircraft fire. After her sorties over
Iraq, she was made an instructor, training the A-10 pilots deployed to
Kosovo. Up and up her career climbed. In her most recent deployment in
Saudi Arabia, she served as principal adviser to the commander of the
joint task force's search-and-rescue operation in Southwest Asia, with
responsibility for planning, training, readiness and execution. If
you're a pilot in trouble in Afghanistan, McSally's unit comes to get
you, most recently picking up crews of a downed helicopter and a B1.

Up until the spring, when she went
public in a USA Today interview with her dissent over the abaya and
related policies, McSally had received uniformly exemplary evaluations
as a "top leader and warrior." Pointing out her strong
commitment to speaking to dozens of community and student groups, her
commanders praised her as "an ambassador for the military,"
she now notes.

Most recently, says McSally, she
has received "a tremendous amount of negative feedback" from
her chain of command in Saudi Arabia. "When they write up my
search-and-rescue command," she says, "they say nothing but
great things, but they say that my choices [in speaking out] were
unprofessional and that I have been a bad example to the young
troops."

While Clarke, the Pentagon
spokeswoman, says McSally has "done a very good job of making her
case in a very respectful and conscientious manner," the officer
herself is not sure what her future will be in the Air Force. She is
committed for two more years.

"Is this the end? I don't
know. I hope not," she says. "I try not to think about
it."

Sweat Pants
in the Desert

Here's what can happen to a military policy.

When McSally first was stationed in
Kuwait, in 1995, female troops had to wear baggy sweat pants when out of
uniform on base.

"I would sit in my little
room, watching all the guys out playing volleyball in their
shorts," she says. "It demeaned me. We were supposed to keep
fit, and we would go on these long runs in the 130-degree heat in the
desert, and we would be totally dehydrated." She appealed to her
commander. He sympathized, but he couldn't get the rule budged.

One day, she spoke at a Christian
women's retreat, and mentioned the challenge of dealing with the
sweat-pants rule. A week later, the Army general in charge of the joint
force summoned her into her commander's office. "My wife was very
intrigued when she heard you speak," the general said. He wanted to
know about her complaints.

She looked at her commander.
"Go ahead," he said.

Tentatively, she explained the
hardship.

"Next morning, it was changed
like that!" says McSally, and she snaps her fingers. The women
could wear shorts, just like the men. She thanked the general.

"Hey, no problem," he
said. "I just wish I had known about it sooner."

"That's important," says
McSally, "because that became a sort of guiding example for
me."

After seven years of buttonholing
brass on the Saudi policy, she gave up working within the system and
filed the lawsuit. "She is not doing this for herself," says
John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute, "but to see
that everybody is treated fairly. This is a heroic act, because it
places her in jeopardy."

McSally sees herself as dutiful.

"We can respect their
customs," she says. "We don't need to impose their values and
faith on us."

She recites her oath of military
service: "I, Martha Elizabeth McSally, do solemnly swear that I
will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against
all enemies foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and
allegiance to the same, that I take this obligation freely, without any
mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and
faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to
enter, so help me God."

"That is what my loyalty is
to," she says, to the Constitution of the United States. "And
my hope would be that they will say about this policy, 'Here, it's
changing.' And I will say, 'God Bless America.' "